[KS] [Zoom event]: The Subjunctive Mode, CGI, and Digital Editing: Documentaries on the Yongsan Massacre and the Sewol Ferry Disaster”

[Ji-hoon Felix Kim]

Dear Colleagues,

The East Asian Studies Program at Princeton University invites you to join
Professor Jihoon Kim’s talk. It will be held virtually on February 24 at
5:00pm EST.

“The Subjunctive Mode, CGI, and Digital Editing: Documentaries on the
Yongsan Massacre and the Sewol Ferry Disaster”
Jihoon Kim (Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, Chung-ang
University)
Discussant: Devin Fore (Professor of German, Princeton University)

REGISTER HERE:
https://princeton.zoom.us/.../tJwod-qtqj8sHNV6RsHuiULLkZ8...
<https://princeton.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwod-qtqj8sHNV6RsHuiULLkZ8-77zB-afp?fbclid=IwAR3blpKxU8sata_26MNIE3QNdmrtaro8xv_fNBbQzn7RrB1elKc-lDddoYo>
(Zoom link will be emailed upon registration)

This talk discusses the applications of computer-generated imagery (CGI)
and digital non-linear editing to three documentaries in the 2010s on
social events that profoundly impacted contemporary South Korean society,
including the Yongsan Massacre in 2009 (*Two Doors/ Tu kaeŭi mun*, Kim
Il-ran and Hong Ji-yoo, 2012) and the Sewol Ferry disaster in 2014 (The
*Intention* [*Kŭnal, pada*, Kim Ji-yeong, 2018] and *Ghost Ship* [
*Yuryŏngsŏn*, Kim Ji-yeong, 2020]). It argues for two more significant
contributions of the films to Korean nonfiction filmmaking and its
commitment to the Korean society’s contested reality and politics. First,
the films attest to the formal and aesthetic expansion of documentary
practice in the 21st century— and, by extension, to its production of
reality and truth— in ways that are irreducible to the verité mode of the
1980s and 90s. And second, more than asserting the disavowal of the
objective truth, the digital images and techniques employed in the films
are used to scientifically investigate and reconstruct the events beyond
the camera’s record for the sake of unveiling their truths. In order to
demonstrate these two points, I examine the uses of digital imagery and
technique in the three films in the light of how they mobilize what Mark J.
P. Wolf has called ‘subjunctive mode,’ a subgenre of the documentary
“concerned with what could be, would be, or might have been.” In so doing,
I also contextualize the application of this mode to the post-verité Korean
documentaries within the global trend of digital documentaries (exemplified
by the works of Errol Morris and Forensic Architecture) based on the
archival, databased, and algorithmic approaches to photos and videos whose
evidentiary value is dismantled but which nevertheless demand viewing from
every possible angle.

*Jihoon Kim* (chungang.academia.edu/JKIM) is associate professor of cinema
and media studies at Chung-ang University. He is the author of *Documentary’s
Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary*
(Oxford UP, 2022) and *Between Film, Video, and the Digital: Hybrid Moving
Images in the Post-media Age* (Bloomsbury, 2018/16). He is also
finalizing *Activism
and Post-activism: Korean Documentary Cinema*, *1982-2021*, the first-ever
English-written scholarly monograph on the Korean nonfiction film and video
in the private and independent sectors since the 1980s.


Jihoon Kim, Ph.D
*Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century
Documentary *(Oxford University Press, 2022).
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/documentarys-expanded-fields-9780197603826?prevSortField=1&sortField=8&resultsPerPage=20&lang=en&cc=us
*Between Film, Video, and the Digital: Hybrid Moving Images in the
Post-media Age* (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018/16).
http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/between-film-video-and-the-digital-9781628922912/

Associate Professor, Cinema and Media Studies
Department of Film Studies
Chung-ang University
website: chungang.academia.edu/JKIM
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